EGEE I

The EGEE project brings together experts from over 27 countries with the common aim of building on recent advances in Grid technology and developing a service Grid infrastructure which is available to scientists 24 hours-a-day.

The project aims to provide researchers in academia and industry with access to major computing resources, independent of their geographic location. The EGEE project will also focus on attracting a wide range of new users to the Grid.

The project will primarily concentrate on three core areas:

• The first area is to build a consistent, robust and secure Grid network that will attract additional computing resources.
• The second area is to continuously improve and maintain the middleware in order to deliver a reliable service to users.
• The third area is to attract new users from industry as well as science and ensure they receive the high standard of training and support they need.

The EGEE Grid will be built on the EU Research Network GÉANT and exploit Grid expertise generated by many EU, national and international Grid projects to date.

Funded by the European Commission, the EGEE project community has been divided into 12 partner federations, consisting of over 70 contractors and over 30 non-contacting participants covering a wide-range of both scientific and industrial applications.

The work being carried out in the project is organised into 11 activities. Two pilot application domains were selected to guide the implementation and certify the performance and functionality of the evolving infrastructure. One is the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid supporting physics experiments and the other is Biomedical Grids, where several communities are facing equally daunting challenges to cope with the flood of bioinformatics and healthcare data.

With funding of over 30 million Euro from the European Commission, the project is one of the largest of its kind. EGEE is a two-year project conceived as part of a four-year programme, where the results of the first two years will provide the basis for assessing subsequent objectives and funding needs.

For the EGEE project, CSIC is responsible for Application Identification and Support (NA4), European Grid Support, Operation and Management (SA1) and Policy and International Cooperation (NA5)